A few weeks ago I made a post about the new series on FX (that’s a Fox network) called “Over There”. I called it propaganda at the time and I’m still quite convinced that it was intended as propaganda, a way for the folks at home to cheer for our brave troops fightin’ terror over in Iraq without having to actually get their minds dirty with real bodies, real blood or real politics. Fox certainly wants this to be a modern day “Ballad of the Green Berets”, the John Wayne Vietnam-era vehicle for loving the American fightin’ man killing commies in gookland.

But it doesn’t translate well to the 21st century, not well at all. I’ve now watched a couple of episodes of this show, most recently tonight’s episode, and while it is all about the gritty and tough soldiers that make up the typical movie platoon (tough street kid, smart guy with glasses, commonsense noncom, reluctant soldier, etc.) in order to portray Iraq they pretty much have to address a lot of the realities over there or get laughed off the screen. Even the propagandists at Fox know good propaganda requires enough truthful elements to be believable or it fails to work.

But one rule the Foxes have failed to learn about propaganda is “don’t believe your own propaganda”, because once you do that you lose the perspective you need to understand the impact it can have.

So yes, Over There is propaganda and is certainly intended to be such by Murdoch.

But there is one thing Over There is doing that cannot be something Murdoch or his ideological sponsors intended. It is finally showing us Americans at war in Iraq. I suspect that this element of the show is one that appeals to the “support the troops doing a noble job” mentality that infects people like Murdoch, or his various talking heads on Faux News, or Scarborough or Limbaugh or whoever and likely is intended to show that with such great and valiant guys and gals over there doing such a tough job we cannot pull out now because we have to honor their commitment.

But that argument is growing stale these days, all the more so with the rise of Cindy Sheehan in the public’s consciousness, and it has an inherent weakness. That weakness comes from the attempt, inherent with such arguments, to justify the policy by the presence and behavior of the troops, to glorify the Great Leader with the exploits and heroism of his army. It is a weakness because all of that dedication and sacrifice, all that heroism, really has nothing at all to do with policy, politics, ideology or The Great Leader. It has to do with human beings who get put in dangerous places and who know instinctively that they need to rely on each other to survive.

That is what heroism is, protecting each others’ backs, honoring each others willingness to sacrifice and individual sacrifice to save the group.

So Over There shows us soldiers doing just that. But it has to show them doing it in context and if tonight’s episode is any indication it is the context that spoils the propaganda. Tonight they showed an $1850/month soldier willing to drive her vehicle through mortar fire so that the $35,000/month truck drivers (brought to you compliments of Halliburton) could have the way cleared for them. It showed a cocky redneck truckdriver with a Kenworth boasting about his salary to a soldier whose job it was to make sure he didn’t get his expensive ass blown up or lose his load of American Standard toilets. And yes, the episode specifically referred to the cargo as American Standard toilets…how’s that for product placement?…and the entire operation was undertaken so a general could get his toilets installed.

That may resonate with the gungho macho crowd who thinks this is American might working its magic in the world but to most of the people of the world, and an increasingly large number of Americans, it is arrogance.

It is also shining a huge and bright beam of light on the one thing I haven’t seen even talked about on the program (though it may have been in the episodes I have not seen) and that is the policy that put them there, the decisions that created that mess in the first place and whether all that sacrifice is getting anything accomplished at all besides blowing up a country, killing its citizens and pissing our military, soldiers and all, down a rat hole.

It’s one thing to make a TV show about a divisive war after the fact, there was a series (Tour of Duty) on during the late 1980s about the Vietnam war that came out long after it ended, but it is entirely another thing to make one that tries to be relatively accurate, if narrowly focused, concerning the realities on the ground there while a divisive war is still raging.

Bush and his administration, most especially the civilian war hawks who designed this mess, have relied on a compliant media and an uninvolved public to keep the hard realities of the war mostly out of sight. We all know they aren’t showing coffins but knowing that is not the same as seeing the stream of coffins arriving nightly via cargo plane. We all know there are wounded but their reality is not our reality so Americans are emotionally disconnected from it. And the bush administration wants this disconnect, they rely on it in fact.

And yet along comes “Over There” which puts those bodies up on the TV screen every Wednesday night, shows us the pain of the multiple amputees on a weekly basis and the anguish of their families. Yes it is all just actors playing roles but in many ways it may be more effective than jerky TV coverage of combat because the nature of drama is that we have to know these people, we have to care about them. And once we care about them the obvious question we have to ask ourselves is “why are they there”? Try as they might to wrap the whole thing in the flag and bravery and sacrifice they cannot cover up the reality that it is all for nothing. That what we are asking our troops to do on a daily basis is not worth the rationale for sending them there.

The bush administration has relied on keeping the American public from personalizing the war but a drama with characters no one cares about is a drama no one will watch and tv moguls, even an ideologue like Murdoch, care about the bottom line. So they are stuck with having to make us care. This gritty little propagandistic drama may just blow up in their faces.